on a brandnew pc (not mine), when i boot, i get bios/post and then i simply get a blinking " _ " at the top of the screen (rather than the standard "no operating system detected, no bootable disk etc)... any brilliant ideas?

- first boot after assembly, i hadnt plugged in a kb or mouse, but it did boot alright, telling me there was no OS installed & no bootable disk. fine, normal behavior.
- i turn it off, second boot, put the windows disk in. goes into install mode.
i forgot the kb, so i plug it in now. no response after plugging in the keyboard. ****. reboot.
- third reboot with the kb connected, does not go into install mode. just hangs after bios/post, blinking " _ " top of the screen.
- fourth reboot. same thing.
- fifth, i go into bios. i can use the kb in bios, so that's not the prob.
- sixth reboot, no response after bios/post, just " _ "
- i think, **** it, and disconnect everything & clear CMOS. that'll teach 'em.
plug everything back in, configure the BIOS date/time/etc and reboot, same problem. just a blinking underscore.
- repeat blinking underscore x1000
- started looking around and found it might be a hdd error. so i disconnect power & sata from the hdd & when i reboot now, i get the standard windows install/boot thing, only of course he doesnt find the hdd (since it's not connected).

any ideas (except a somehow borked HDD or a potentially fubared mobo)?

when i plug it in as a slave, it just says it's an unpartitioned drive, but works just fine.

i'm starting to think that the problem was simply that there was a partial or corrupted boot section on it and that the motherboard kept hammering it, thus becoming stuck before going to the secondary boot drive (in this case the SATA DVD-RW).

currently checking the drive for errors, but coming up zilch for now... looks like it came back alive.

pretty annoying problem to have if you dont have a second pc to hook it up to. thanks for reminding me to try & hook it up as a slave (or i'd probably get ****ed up the *** during the RMA process).